If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

New member from Tennessee!

Hey guys, I just wanted to tell you how amazed I am at how helpful and genuinely nice everybody seems on this forum. Honestly this is probably only the second forum I've ever joined and visited more than once or twice. This seems like a great place for a new or returning collector to get back into the swing of things.
Here's a little bit about myself. I first began collecting in the early 90's. Me and some friends were constantly walking down to the local corner store and picking up whatever cards we could find. There usually wasn't much of a selection, maybe one brand of baseball cards and one brand of basketball cards. After those boxes were empty they might get a couple of boxes of the same thing or maybe something completely different. What I'm getting at is my collection was very sporadic. I don't think I even bothered separating my cards in to sets. I would just put the members of the same teams on the same pages and call it a day.
Later on, by the time I got into high school I was buying some cards from a comic book shop and had pretty much settled on just collecting basketball cards. At the time ( or at least to me) it seemed like that was the beginning of the insert card first becoming popular. To make a long story short I soon got into other things and my money and time was being tied up elsewhere.
So here I am today deciding to get back into collecting. Wow...it seems like things have changed quite a bit. After a weeks worth of researching on the internet I started to feel a little overwhelmed. So that's pretty much what lead me to joining this forum.
Maybe you guys can point me in the right direction and help a little bit here. I like building sets of cards but to be honest I'm not really even sure what is considered a complete set these days. To have a complete set do you have to have all of the auto cards and super rare hits or just the basic set and the inserts? So far I like the idea of buying hobby boxes because of the guaranteed hits but I also like being able to run to the local wal-mart and pick up a couple of blaster boxes. I guess my big question is if it's better to buy hobby boxes or retail for set building. I don't wanna spent the cash on a hobby box just for the 4 hits and a bunch of doubles. I guess I'm just trying to ask what opinions you guys have about set building.

Welcome to the site. Sorry, I can't give you any opinion on set building since I pretty much only collect in-person auto's and HOF game-used cards. There are a lot of folks here that are more than willing to help. Again, welcome to the site and BOL with your collection.

Welcome to SCF! A set is kind of like a sub set of a big product, like 2012 Topps baseball for example. There's the base cards, inserts, Game Used, Autos, Printing Plates, etc. Just completing one of those would be a set. A master set would be like collecting every single card in the set possible excluding 1/1's of course. Some people have a different meaning to the word master set like me. I find retail packs to be the best for building the base set of a product.

Thanks for the advice man.The retail vs hobby thing really had me hung up when it came to set building. I bought enough retail that when I started thinking about buying a hobby box I felt like I was only going to be doing it for the hits.